The monitoring of complex or spacious buildings or spaces requires a multiplicity of monitoring devices, for example monitoring cameras, in order to be able to extensively cover such monitoring areas. Whereas, in earlier monitoring installations, the image data streams were transmitted by the monitoring cameras in analog form to monitoring centers and were evaluated there, it has become known in the meantime to connect monitoring cameras to a data network and to digitally transmit the image data streams. For this purpose, it is necessary to integrate the monitoring cameras in the data network and to allocate a network address (IP address) to them. The monitoring camera must then be “found” by the monitoring center in the data network in order to be able to communicate with it. Consequently, the integration of a monitoring camera in a network usually requires the sophisticated expert knowledge of a system administrator in order to be able to carry out the start-up process without errors.